Wednesday, September 01, 2010

Missed a spot.

I was so proud of my awesome sunblock yesterday, but my sunblock application skillz were neither mad nor 1337. I missed a patch on the right side of my neck just above the collar of my shirt, and I got cooked there. In a cool room I can feel the heat coming off of it on my jawline right above it...

21 comments:

There's a product called "Banana boat sport sunscreen". It's like a Chapstick. I keep one in my range bag. Works pretty good.

My eastern european ancestry dictates that I have a pasty white skin the consistency of the belly of a toad, and the slightest exposure to sun causes me to burst into flames like Bram's creations. Consequently I never ever wear shorts or short sleeved shirts. On the rare occasions that I'm out in the sun without a hat, the banana boat stuff does an excellent job of keeping me from immolating. I do wish they made it in SPF 2000.

Just don't apply Banana Boat anywhere above your eyebrows, and wash your hands really well or at least wipe them vigorously on a range towel. BB in your eyes, even in miniscule amounts, will ruin the everlovin' crap out of the rest of your day. But otherwise, BB is excellent stuff.

I second the notion that aloe works well. My wife brought an aloe plant into the house, and it took six years for my black thumb to finally kill it. In the meantime, it had grown and grown and grown. It was always useful on burns of any sort.

Maybe I shouldn't have placed it directly in front of the air conditioning unit.

There are several "after-sun" products that contain aloe and lidocaine which work reasonably well too.

I've never used SPF 100, but I've used a lot of SPF 50, which goes on like housepaint. This makes it a pain to re-apply, but last summer convinced me: no matter what it says on the bottle, reapply every two or three hours. Period.

I used to laugh at sunburns. Then my friends and family started getting pieces cut off of them. Now I do not laugh at sunburn.

Perhaps that aerosolized sunscreen might be a good backstop (on account of its better coverage) to the smear-on stuff; I don't know if it is as reliably effective but for the tricky bits it might be handy.

I have a nice big clump of Aloe Strata growing in the side yard for just such occurances. It's smaller than the Aloe Vera plant but works just the same, and grows great in the shade down here in Florida. Definately wouldn't work as an outside plant up there in the great frozen north (Indiana) though.

Ma'am as a fellow blue-eyed paleface, you have my heartfelt sympathy. I live in Southern Florida, and try not to go outdoors in the daytime. If I go outdoors after dark, I risk arrest for "being on foot after dark" or something. I am so going to hell for thinking and saying this, but Oh I hate my neighbors who run this town.

What I do is live with the pain and peeling until I reach a terminal state of burn reminicent of intermediate Cherokee, and it protects me. When I walk into work all the Polish people point at me and go "roc, roc". It means lobster.

For reference, there has never been a case of skin cancer in my freckled, albino family, although most of them have been military for a living, usually on or near one ocean or another.

I'm told it happens mostly to people with warts or "beauty marks". I guess I'm not beautiful.